The digital currency race

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2021

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Central banks and many companies are rushing to develop their own digital currencies. Why are they doing it? What are the risks? And how might it upend our relationship with money?

Ed Butler speaks to Jay Joe, who runs a company providing some of the tech behind the Bahamas’ new digital currency, the Sand Dollar. Josh Lipsky of the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center, explains what central banks in the Bahamas and elsewhere hope to gain from digitisation.

Samantha Hoffman, senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Unit, explains how China might use its new digital version of the Yuan to snoop on people. And David Birch, author or The Currency Cold War, hopes digital currencies may soon allow our fridge and car to manage our finances for us.

Producers: Edwin Lane, Benjie Guy

(Picture: currency symbols. Credit: Getty Images.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, amidst the pandemic,
0:07.3	there's a race on by lots of countries to mint new digital currencies.
0:12.1	Digital currencies are potentially a very effective way to deliver cash directly to citizens.
0:18.3	For a central bank like the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve.
0:21.8	The ability to deliver money instantaneously to someone's phone is very attractive.
0:25.8	But what will the new era of digitised money, both public and private, mean for how we regard our governments in future?
0:33.8	We see Amazon launching its own currency in Mexico.
0:36.8	We've already seen Facebook launching its currency.
0:39.6	The idea of the nation state being synonymous with the originator of currency is probably coming to an end.
0:46.9	The future of money in a digital age.
0:49.1	That's Business Daily from the BBC.
0:54.4	Please pray for us. Please pray for us, everyone. Please pray for us.
0:55.9	Please pray for us, everyone.
0:57.3	Please pray for us.
0:58.5	Swing us of 200 miles per hour.
1:01.3	What do you do when a devastating natural disaster, the worst hurricane ever recorded in
1:07.2	your country, destroys homes and businesses?
1:13.0	I have seen utter devastation here.
1:14.2	Absolute devastation.
1:15.3	There really are no words.
1:16.5	It is pure hell.
1:23.3	How do you rebuild when the storms even destroyed people's means to pay for basic goods and services?
	...

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